Travelling salesman is a largely solved problem, but I'd say this problem is larger.

As soon as humans and the real world are involved, seemingly contradictory criteria need to be met.

Algorithms like A* search may not be able to capture these criteria robustly enough.

Example: a driver may be assigned the optimal route, but because they are human will not want to sit and wait for 15 minutes between several of their rides

A* is great for path finding but it's not a global panacea for all subproblems related to ridesharing